Hotel Blogging Best Practices, Part 1: Publishing Options (Onsite or Off?)

This is the first part in a series on best practices in hotel blogging.  Make sure you’ve signed up for updates by email or RSS to receive the whole feature.  Today we’ll start at the beginning: finding the best publishing platform.

If you’ve decided to pursue blogging as a way to promote your hotel online, great!  The very first step is deciding on the tool you’ll use to publish your blog.  Fortunately, as blogging has become more and more popular over the last few years, a number of great options have emerged.

Stand alone blog tools (hosted on your server)

• WordPress.org – one of the most popular publishing tools, WordPress is a free script that you can install on your own server.  With dozens of features and a focus on usability, this is my recommendation to most people.  (We use it here for this blog!)
• Movable Type – the business version starts around $400

Hosted blog tools (hosted on a 3rd-party server)

• Blogger.com – a very popular free blogging system by Google
• WordPress.com – a hosted version of WordPress, this is a good way to go if you decide not to host on your own server.  Premium upgrades are available at a very low cost.
• TypePad – many features and options, but a bit more expensive

How do you choose between an stand alone or hosted publishing tool?  Really, it’s quite simple.  Just consider…

1. What is the purpose of the blog?  If it’s to draw traffic and add awareness to your brand, you may want to host the blog on your hotel’s site or a separate domain.  Having your own domain gives you some search engine advantages, like being able to choose the keywords in the domain.   In this case, you would want an on-site publishing tool.
2. How comfortable are you with setting up a website?  Are you familar with uploading and editing code?  Can you work with domains and databases?  If you – or someone on your staff – knows how to do this, then you may want an on-site blog publishing system for the flexibility it gives you.  If setting up your own website sounds too complicated, 3rd-party blog hosting is a great alternative.